Ascendancy

The adventure begins

As luck would have it, our adventurers were all scheduled to show up for initiation into the Adventurers’ Guild at the same time. To test their combat skills, Drill Sergeant Rakhan had them face off against a number of Master Summoner Viridien‘s elementals and Master Inventor Soira’s mechanical gnomes. Having only just met each other a few moments ago, teamwork and tactics within the band was sorely lacking. Darhe’el found himself caught between two dust elementals and quickly succumbed to their shredding winds. Soon it was every man for himself, but their sheer combat ability allowed them to start taking back the advantage.

Then everything went wrong. The mangled remains of Soira’s mechagnomes began to self-assemble, congregating into a massive mechanical monstrosity. While Soira stood there aghast, Rakhan leapt into the fray, shouting orders to the disorganized crew. Banding together, the adventurers managed to bring the giant construct under control, with a well-placed mug of ale thrown by C1 into its logic centre short-circuiting it and shutting it down.

Suitably impressed, Rakhan declared them all new members of the Guild. After the paperwork was done and they’d all received their Adventurer’s Marque (an arcane tattoo identifying them as guild members), they were approached by an apologetic Soira, who told them that a defective logic circuit was responsible for the earlier malfunction with the mechagnomes. She then gave them their first assignment: Track down the merchant who’d sold her the defective parts and find his supplier.

It wasn’t difficult to find the shop in question, but no one was in and the party’s attempt to pick the lock failed miserably. Fortunately, they found out from the neighbours that the merchant also maintained a warehouse near the docks. On the way there, our adventurers were surprised to find people fleeing in terror from out of control mechanical constructs. Getting closer, they discovered that the constructs were streaming out of the very warehouse they were looking for.

They hacked and slashed through seemingly endless waves of machines; fortunately, Darrak was able to overload most of the mindless automatons with haunting Visions of Bieber. Finally winning their way through, the adventurers discovered the source of the constructs – a huge assemblery-thing. Astute observation and quick thinking allowed them to shut down the assembler with a power surge.

Unconscious on the floor next to the assembler was the merchant they’d been tasked to find, as well as a mysterious woman…